God Bless This Mess(16)

“She opened it the night before she died,” they told me. So even though I was so sad that I wouldn’t see my MawMaw again, I had my pink “silky” that smelled like her—a special fabric that she let me pick out from her trunk of sewing scraps—and I had the belief that she was my guardian angel, always watching over me, just like the grandma angel I’d given to her for Christmas.

“What do you mean, Mama?” I asked. “Robin and Trent and Aunt LeeLee can’t be angels in heaven. MawMaw’s an angel in heaven. What do you mean?”

“They’re gone,” she said. “Honey, they’re gone.”

“How can they be gone?”

My mom clearly didn’t want to answer me, but I would not stop asking questions. So she finally explained as best she could: “A bad man came to their house and hurt them,” she said. “God didn’t want them to hurt anymore, so they went to heaven where they could not feel it.”

My mom started sobbing. Patrick cried, too, even though I’m sure he understood even less than I did. He’s told me he has no memory of that day, and hardly any memory of the whole thing. But I knew something was wrong. I knew it when Daddy didn’t come to my recital.

My mom wrapped her arms around me and Patrick, and we all sobbed together there on that little bed for a very long time. I stared out the window through my tears, staring and staring at the sky. I was waiting to see them, hoping to see them swoop down from the clouds.

It would take a few days for me to understand that Aunt LeeLee and Robin and Trent had been murdered. It would take months after that to put the pieces together, since nobody wanted to talk about it. And it would take years for me to get the whole story, once I was old enough to look it all up for myself on the Internet.

The murder of a mom and two young children, in their own home, in a quiet small town, was big news in Alabama. We occasionally saw flashes of the story come up on the news when the investigation was going on, and later when the trial was going on, but my parents always changed the channel. They couldn’t take it. And clearly they wanted us to forget about it, too.

But I couldn’t forget. Even though it scared me, I wanted to know more. It’s just how I am. I remained silent and blocked it out for quite a few years, but I eventually found the strength to google the case. And the clearer and clearer the story became, the more horrifying it was.

One day, a man knocked on my aunt’s front door. My uncle was at work. The kids were playing in the house. There was no school that day because it was a bad-weather day. My aunt was busy in the kitchen, but she went to the front door and answered. It was someone she knew. Someone she thought she knew well. A man who had done much of the remodeling on their house. A man she trusted. A man she and Uncle Stu had let live in their travel trailer in their backyard for weeks on end while the work was being done. A man they ate dinner with sometimes, in the kitchen where she was busy cooking dinner.

This man was out on a work-release program after being imprisoned for a nonviolent offense. My aunt and uncle had given him work. They had given him shelter. My aunt had sewn up the holes in his clothes. He was around so much and had so many conversations with them that my aunt considered him a friend.

So when he knocked on the door that day, she invited him in. Without hesitation.

No one can know what words were said, of course, because the only other people in the house were the kids. But from what he confessed, and what the police put together, my aunt stepped into another room for a minute to tend to the kids, and when she returned, she caught this man rifling through her purse—trying to steal money. His girlfriend was a drug user. An addict. She was desperate. He was desperate. He knew my aunt usually kept cash in her wallet, because it was from that wallet that she paid him on a regular basis. So he went there to steal from her. Because he knew.

When she walked back into the kitchen and saw what he was doing, she tried to stop him. He panicked. He couldn’t take the thought of going back to prison. So he pulled out a Leatherman, a multipurpose tool, and stabbed her with it. Aunt LeeLee fought him off and ran into another room, screaming for Robin and Trent to run and hide. Robin tried to leave but had trouble with the door. So the man grabbed her, pulled her inside, took a steak knife from the kitchen, and stabbed her with it. The blade of the knife broke off in her body, so he grabbed another one, and stabbed her again until she was dead.

By this time my aunt had somehow fled upstairs and managed to get Trent to hide in a cabinet where my brother, Patrick, and I used to hide when we played hide-and-seek.

When the man came upstairs, she asked him why he was doing this.

He had “gone too far now,” he told her, and he stabbed her again. As she lay dying on the floor, he found Trent. He slid open the door to the cabinets in the hallway. He pulled Trent out, four-year-old Trent, and he killed him, too.

When it was all over, he went back and stabbed all three of them again, just to make sure they were dead.

When my uncle came home from work a few hours later, he walked into a nightmare worse than any of us ever could have imagined. And to this day, I don’t think any of us, least of all him, can fully wrap our heads around it.

None of it made sense.

I knew something was wrong. Kids know. Even little kids. They sense things. They understand more than their parents want to believe sometimes. And when my mom told us that somebody had come into their house and “hurt them,” it terrified me in the deepest parts of my heart. Like I said, I didn’t know the whole story with all the details until years later, but coming that close to something so awful, so terrifying—it was a turning point for me. It changed everything. I was no longer living in the innocence of an untouched childhood.